Nilsen, Øystein: The Syntax of Circumstantial Adverbials

This thesis can be seen as an attempt to apply three theories to the domain of circumstantial adverbials. Listing them in arbitrary order, the three theories are Richard Kayne’s (1994) antisymmetry theory of phrase structure, Guglielmo Cinque’s (1995, 1999) theory of the universal hierarchy of functional projections, and Donald Davidson’s (1967) event semantics. The author will not propose any significant changes to any of these theories. The purpose of the thesis is to argue that when they are combined, they give strikingly accurate predictions concerning the syntactic behaviour of circumstantial adverbials in Norwegian. This is not a crosslinguistic investigation, but it is reasonable to assume that the syntactic representation of circumstantials promoted here can also be extrapolated to other languages.Øystein Nilsen (born 1971) got his M.Phil. degree from the University of Tromsø in 1998 and is now a Research Fellow at the University of Utrecht.